Asger reached a point where digital game libraries stopped helping him play and started delaying it. Hundreds of titles sat behind menus, so choosing one required scrolling, second-guessing, and more scrolling. Childhood cartridges had worked differently. A glance at a few plastic cases settled the decision before any screen lit up.
Years of dust and neglect left one Atari Jaguar looking far from its original form when Tito of Macho Nacho Productions decided it deserved better treatment. A console that launched in 1993 with bold claims of 64-bit power and then faded after modest sales sat filthy and unused. Tito took it apart, vacuumed out the accumulated grime, cleaned the internals thoroughly, and put it back together with a fresh set of capacitors from a Console5 kit to address the aging power and signal components that fail over time on machines this old.
Michael Pick wanted a small electric pickup without paying forty thousand dollars or waiting for something like the Slate to reach the market. High gas prices made his old V6 Ranger feel expensive to run, so he bought a high-mileage 2017 BMW i3 REx sight unseen from an online auction for fifty-eight hundred dollars and set out to convert it himself.
LCLDIY took a flexible display from one of the earliest foldable phones and built an actual PlayStation 2 around it. The result is a clamshell handheld, called the PlayStation 2 Duo, that runs genuine PS2 discs or their digital equivalents, folds for easier carrying, and looks finished enough that someone might mistake it for a limited-run product.
Twenty five years after Halo Combat Evolved redefined console shooters on the original Xbox, a fan project has moved its multiplayer suite onto the Nintendo 64. Halo 64, created by Jack Tulli and available on GitHub, runs the original game’s objects, physics, collision detection, weapons, game types, HUD and pathfinding on the N64’s VR4300 processor. Maps come from a player’s own Xbox disc image. A new renderer, menu system, HUD drawing and sound layer sit on top of libdragon and tiny3d.
Hearing the name Storm of Crows might bring to mind fantasy games or dark forests, yet the real item comes from Chinese military records of long ago. Tod Cutler at Tod’s Workshop took the idea of a cup arrow, the romantic label for a bundle of smaller shafts, and set out to launch it from his Tzusun siege crossbow. That machine copies the Ox Bow design, a triple-bowed frame that once required oxen to draw and sent broomstick-sized bolts downrange with hundreds of joules of force. Single large arrows could punch through armor or men, but they left groups of infantry largely untouched unless the targets lined up neatly. Chinese engineers therefore developed a way to send many short arrows at once, creating a spread of hits that covered more ground.
A thirty-dollar FNIRSI DMC-100 clamp meter now hosts a complete, playable episode of DOOM, complete with all nine maps, the title screen, intermissions, the finale, the menu, and four save slots. Polish developer Artur Bieniek made this possible by adapting the doomgeneric engine, drawn from id Software’s source release, to the meter’s Artery AT32F415 microcontroller. That chip runs at 150 MHz, yet it provides only 32 kilobytes of RAM, an amount smaller than the 64,000 bytes needed for a single original Doom frame. Bieniek’s port therefore ranks among the leanest versions of the game ever made, beating the previous low of 64 kilobytes recorded on a Neo Geo release.
Owning a Philips CD-i often means dealing with controllers that feel more like afterthoughts than proper game pads. Released in 1991 as a multimedia player that later tried to become a game console, the machine never sold in large numbers, and its original input devices remain scarce and expensive decades later. Most units shipped with an infrared remote or the awkward pointing device known as the spoon, neither of which works well for anything requiring quick reactions or precise movement.
